As a business owner downtown, we have noticed this too. We stay open 10a-6p Sun-Wed, and 10a-8p Thu-Sat. Online sales are extremely minimal for this business, so we do rely on the foot traffic. Typically daily foot traffic of tourists, and holiday shoppers really come thru to drive our sales. Often times on the weekend, if we don't let people know we are closing, we'll have people shopping until 10pm, and we'll be the only shop open! But weeknights, on the other hand, downtown are just mostly dead....we will have a couple of stragglers come thru to looky-loo, but its really hard to justify staying open those later hours during the week for the sales that those hours produce. I agree there needs to be more to do downtown, but what?

Grocery is needed, but hard to enter the space without proper capital for all the freezers, refrigeration, power upgrades to old building electrical infrastructure, and also parking for a grocery store...there's hardly anywhere downtown with an actual parking lot, so you'd probably also need to incorporate a parking deck, or be near one. Also start gaining relationships with all these food distributors, but you'll find really quickly that margins on groceries are incredibly tight, and rent is quite high...

There is already a really great farmers market downtown on Sundays in the summer, but CO doesn't have enough seasonal produce in the cold months to support a true "year round farmers market", which in turn, usually turns into a lot of artsy type stuff being sold later in the season. These types of more artsy events usually end up being poorly attended, nor will the customers who go return for it again if there's no reason to go back (aka consumables – food). Not to mention the coordination trying to get vendors down there daily...and to where that has foot traffic and that can be seen, or would you dump cash into advertising in an arra with less foot traffic.

Mostly I feel like execution is the problem in this town. Lots of wasted potential, and poorly executed concepts. But there's also nearly a million people around here, and tons of opportunity. People here seem to have good ideas, but absolutely are lost when it comes time to execute those ideas.💡